


Common to the Race

by breathedout



Category: Historical RPF, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: (sort of), A sad ending, Cross-continental meandering, Debunking of Spiritualism, Denial, Disguise, Everything is fairly ACD canonical but still:, F/M, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Road Trip, Spiritualism, Vaguely dubcon handholding, Voyeurism, grief and mourning, more like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 17:28:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18665029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: July 1895.Or, Holmes thought—unwilling, bracing himself against it, halting where he stood with his eyes screwed shut but his cursed brainwouldinsist upon doing the thing completely—perhaps bloody Watson wantedsomethingso desperately that this villain had hooked him, body and mind.





	Common to the Race

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [Laura JV (jacquez)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacquez/pseuds/Laura%20JV) in the [VictorianHolmesKinkmemeRound01](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/VictorianHolmesKinkmemeRound01) collection. 



> For the prompt on the Victorian Holmes kink meme: "Watson is grieving Sherlock after the events of “A Game of Shadows”, and turns to some of the occultists for ways to contact his friend’s spirit. Holmes finds out."
> 
> Worthy of notice: Anything I'll ever attempt to write in this particular Holmesian canon will live in the shade of candle_beck's [Mistakes of Our Youth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/186097). You certainly don't need to read it for this to make sense, but if you have, then you will see the throughline. If you haven't… get out the kleenex.
> 
> As ever, many thanks to the lovely [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash) for the beta, as well as for rewatching these films with me as "research." <3 <3 Honestly, y'all, I considered recruiting a London-picker but then I realized I would also have to get an Istanbul-picker and an Athens-picker and a Barcelona-picker and it all got too much for this fun little story about death that was intended as an escape from my other writing projects. Which are also about death. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Holmes was in Constantinople when the first missive arrived—seated, as for the few days previous had been his habit, on a low stone retaining wall in a narrow cobbled street, for all the world a common beggar in his filthy salvar and what scraps remained of his last London nightshirt: his teeth blacked; his left eye soaped to bloodshot; a studied tremor in the hand he reached out imploringly to the trickle of passers-by which had amounted to rag collectors; military men; Halit the vegetable-seller with his loaded baskets balanced across the back of his fat little pony; but none of whom yet that day nor the day before nor the day before that had walked with the tell-tale in-turned right foot of the man whom Holmes had it on good authority might respond to an application of judicious force by disclosing the location a certain silk trader with whom Holmes craved words, and so—and so, in short, there he was; and had been for hours past. And the bothersome, the truly _galling_ element of the whole afternoon, was that even placed as he was, dedicated as he was to observing everything which passed in the street before him, still he missed the arrival—and in fact the departure—of Mycroft's man. 

One moment: a private and his sergeant, the latter surprised, minutes earlier; his sash still untucked at the back where he'd failed to shove it into his trousers when he'd—a horse's hoof compressing the filthy bowler dropped on the stones hours earlier when a man, distracted by the sight of his lover in—a sailor, seafaring striped white-and-scarlet, smoothing the new-shaven skin around a voluminous moustache with fingers from which a ring, recently removed—a wet nose of a mutt at Holmes's elbow, snuffling, butting at his hand and his boot into which was tucked: a folded envelope of white wove paper, unmarked; unaddressed; watermarked simply _M. H._. 

Holmes looked up. Even the dog had gone; but there, turning the corner, in a fez and a European-style suit, dragging behind him just slightly his right foot—

A sprint; and a tussle. The man might be weak when he fell back on his right side but he had a full head of height on Holmes and half a foot of reach. A left to the jaw and Holmes was knocked to the side, spinning into the face of a startled horse and then— _off_ ; a race across Galata Bridge, planks springing under his pounding feet as he dodged carriages; crates; an old man shaking his walking stick at him haring off after his quarry who near the northern end of the bridge knocked against a pair of merchants deep in conversation until— _slam_ , a barrel tipped and rolled but Holmes leapt aside; wove; pursued the rogue past mosque—synagogue—(panting)—cathedral—and caught him at last on a wide path in a park: back to the trunk of a Judas tree with Holmes's fists to his ribs; stomach; jaw. Spitting blood, he told what he knew. 

An evening well spent, Holmes thought; and reeling from blows and from success he drank for an hour in a riverside tavern before stumbling back across the bridge and up the hill to his rented room barely large enough for a bed and a chair and a mat and a chamber-pot, its two exterior walls nothing but giant shutters which he opened now to the warm breeze and the sunset, and the evening call to prayer. 

A match struck; the oil lamp lit. From the doubled-up fold of his sash he extracted the envelope, moisture-stained now with perspiration, and grimed with filth. (Tomorrow, he thought: the baths.) The paper rectangle having been revolved and catalogued, he took the knife from the window-ledge and slit the envelope open to be greeted by another, slightly cleaner sheet of Mycroft's watermarked stationery and a message which his brother had not, however, seen fit to personalise any further: machine-typed and unsigned, so that for a moment Holmes considered: _Impostor?_ before thinking, in quick succession: _Presumptuous_ ; _Interfering_ ; _Can I not leave him to see to the affairs of one solitary city in the whole of the globe_ : all of which served as indications that it was indeed most likely Mycroft who had seen fit to send his brother the message: _JW has been several times to consult a spirit medium. London and Cambridge._

The initials alone made a hot— _lurch_ and then: what business was it of _his_ , Holmes felt. He turned the sheet over. Finding nothing more written upon it, he crumpled it in his hand. Smoothed it out again. Outraged, lit another match, and let the flame eat away at the _M_ and at the _H_. What earthly right had his brother, he thought, or anyone come to that, seeking him out, harassing him, defiling the sanctity of his chosen retreat, disrupting the crucial business on which he was engaged, with this—distraction. After all this time. 

Reverberant call of the muezzin. Lamps flickering in the darkening city, silhouetted by purples and golds. The raki fading in Holmes's blood, his tongue still thick with anise, the ache of his bruises leaked through more and more. That fellow might have cracked his rib, the arm he had on him. Fingers probing at his own side, he smiled; and was reminded the man had split his lip as well. 

Four years on, Holmes thought. If Watson wanted to waste his time with balderdash then let him; and damn Mycroft, too. 

He lay back on the bed. Flipped through his notebook to a blank page and then, in an impromptu cipher based on the page numbers of the much-abused Baedeker's guide left by a previous traveler, which might, he thought spitefully, cause Mycroft a moment's puzzle, wrote: 15/3/4, 78/20/5, 1/9/1, 98/2/3: 

_None of my concern_. 

The next day, prickling with the sudden sense of being observed—and having concluded his business with the silk trader by the late morning, which left a choice of avenues for further pursuit—Holmes left Constantinople, meandering overland by way of Tekirdağ and Gallipoli. When he reached the open sea he hired a boat along with a man to pilot it, and issued the fellow instructions to keep his mouth shut.

For two days they were silent together: just the waves and the water and the two of them, under the sun, with only the occasional fishing boat hoving into view to break the monotony. Holmes had craved a space apart but he still found that against his will he'd deduced the man's life story by the time they took harbour in Mikonos. There, Holmes, concluding the thing called for utter seclusion from the curse of humanity, spent two nights sleeping on the open beach before agreeing to take lodgings with the elderly—and yet hardy; and also extremely insistent—Mrs Parthenia Nakos: innkeeper, welcoming-committee, and self-appointed guardian of that stretch of coastline. Which was, whatever else one might say of it, undeniably out of the way. 

It wasn't to last, of course. Three days later, hungering with his whole skin and his blood for some metropolis—any metropolis would do—he paid passage on a fishing boat, fairly twitching with such over-exposure to the bucolic. Almost the moment he set foot on Athenian soil he was accosted by a small girl in English-style short pants who spoke, for reasons which remained obscure, nothing but Italian. She needn't say a word, however: such an apparition could only want one thing with Sherlock Holmes, and that was in the white watermarked envelope that she dropped into his palm before vanishing into the crowd. 

A single sheet; only a single word. _Palladino_ , Mycroft had written: this time, at least, in his own hand. Holmes grit his teeth, and retrieved his pipe. 

The thing did not merit a response. The woman was a fraud, yes. An opportunist, indubitably. A preyer upon the weak and the grieving, for whom she purported to, oh: levitate tables; manifest unearthly presences; speak with the dead. Well. Perhaps Watson had taken a fancy to watch parlour furniture lift off the floor. Who should say him no? Not Holmes, certainly. Perhaps the man was amusing himself with working out the mechanisms of the woman's tricks. Eminently reasonable: it was something Holmes might do himself. Perhaps Watson, having fallen back into his old familiar vices—the card table, the races—contemplated supplementing his income by trying his hand as a magician upon the stage, and he sought out this Palladino looking to hone his technique. Wildly, in the middle of Hermes Street, Holmes laughed aloud at the thought, startling a black-clad and disapproving matron. And then, feeling suddenly—lighter, somehow, he continued on, grinning, looking about himself. Surveying the street, the piers, the swarming bustling cradle of civilisation, the humanity about him of whom he could—cat-lover, that woman; five, no, six of them at home in a flat not big enough to—young girl fussing with the cloth covering her hair in such a way that—something that man doesn't want his father, no, _employer_ to see in that newspaper he was—and here was Holmes, in the midst of it all. He should send along a rabbit, he thought. And a hat. Watson, receiving them, would crumple his eyebrows up in that distinctive way of his, and then perhaps, with a hint of the old hysterical, devil-take-us tone in his wide-mouthed laugh—

Or, Holmes thought—unwilling, bracing himself against it, halting where he stood with his eyes screwed shut but his cursed brain _would_ insist upon doing the thing completely—perhaps bloody Watson wanted _something_ so desperately that this villain had hooked him, body and mind. Well. Well: if so then Holmes, who had—had excised himself from the situation, twice over; first from the man and then, a decade later, from the city; who four years since had seen man and wife safely reunited and then had given up— _London_ , he. And who now had inarguably crucial work to do in—heads of state requesting his presence in Rome and Paris and it wasn't, he wasn't, he couldn't, he was well out of it, it simply was not his concern. 

Across the way: a telegraph office. Holmes, grunting, knocked out his tobacco on a pediment, and stomped into the place. All the dozen people at the counters turned to look at him. Gladly enough he glowered back. 

_New development?_ he scrawled, under _Mycroft Holmes_ ; and then, practically spitting but writing it out anyway: _Bound Sicily by boat._

That night he made inquiries; crashed into the particular bare-knuckle fight against which his contact had most strongly warned; went six rounds with a man quicker than him, larger than him, younger than him. And then, as a boy of twenty stood at the front of the crowd, following the movement of Holmes's hips with bright-black eyes and tightening his fingers on the cap in his hands, Holmes knocked out his opponent and just before the fight was called turned to give his admirer the smallest jerk of his chin; so that half an hour later in the filtered moonlight under the docks, fist in the boy's dark hair, he was listening to him choke and whimper as, messy and fervent and with all his mistakes ahead of him, he tried to swallow Holmes's cock. After: boneless. Defenceless. Polluted with all manner of fluids Holmes slid down the scraping stone wall and let himself say to this boy just—anything he wished. It was safe enough. The fellow only understand the tone of his voice, anyway, as Holmes frigged him and talked and talked at him and didn't let him finish until he did. The two of them could speak not a word to each other that they both might comprehend; and so Holmes let him take his hand, after, and lead him back to his little rooms.

The next morning, however, he was back at the dock, grinding his teeth: bound for Sicily, by boat. 

In Sicily, nothing whatsoever awaited him. 

To stay any length of time would have been to admit that he anticipated Mycroft's reply. Therefore, he was off at once: remaining just as long as it took to assist a pair of poor but genteel Austrian traveling-companions to recover the belt of bills that had one of them had misplaced on a visit to the fish market; and then, as was only polite, to accept their offer of a meal in recompense for his efforts; and to then—since it happened that Hannah was of a botanical and an entomological bent, and that Franziska gave her little fellowship in that capacity although "I do try," she assured Holmes, "to show an interest"—to hire for the three of them a carriage which might take them from Palermo to the slopes of Mount Etna to observe endemic plant species adapted to volcanic conditions. Spread out on a checked blanket at the edge of a lava field, feasting on the farmer's lunch Franziska had packed, Hannah made positive identifications of _Viola aetnensis_ and _Senecio aetnensis_ specimens—and Holmes, while documenting a _Berberis aetnensis_ , became suddenly and uncomfortably aware that he was currently picnicking with a pair of Germanic spinsters on a remote lava field, in August, and that he had no legitimate interest in botany as divorced from crime, and that he had no legitimate business in Sicily at all, and that indeed his entire situation, Mycroft or no Mycroft, was intolerable, and in need of swift revision. 

Upon their return to Palermo it transpired that the swiftest of a number of less-than-ideal conveyances was the next morning's ferry. This Holmes duly boarded, remaining on deck as it meandered hither and yon about the Tyrrhenian Sea, making leisurely stops at Sardinia and Corsica before reversing course to dally at a small town on the mainland, north of Rome, before finally acquiescing to assay the open Mediterranean. Two days later, more than a little ill-tempered, and having, twelve hours before, smoked the last of his tobacco over a conversation with a grizzled French seaman about the evolving nuances of the Marseillaise opium trade, he disembarked in Barcelona to find—naturally, as Holmes had given no indication of his next port of call—his brother's messenger awaiting him. 

With a difference, however. This time, he knew the woman. Or had done, briefly, years before. An agent of long standing, more than a decade his senior, she had been his point of contact for a little problem in Madrid on which Holmes, infant that he had been at the time, had served as Mycroft's feet on the ground. Twenty-five years ago she had been—terrifying, he recalled, in her efficiency; and devastating even before he'd known that much. The first time he'd met her she'd worn a scarlet evening gown with enough yardage to clothe two dozen schoolchildren. He'd actually stuttered, when she'd held out her hand; and for the rest of their acquaintance, despite his best verbal and intellectual gymnastics, had not been able to shake the to-him-unaccustomed impression that she regarded him, affectionately, as her _hired muscle_. Now she was entirely grey, and outfitted almost severely in skirt and shirtwaist; but there was still that old flexible solidity in her way of standing: ready to move, yet accustomed to taking up space. 

"Lidia," he said. Overly familiar, and no doubt not even hers, yet the only name by which he'd ever known her. "You're looking well." 

"I don't say the same," she told him, and handed over the now-familiar white wove envelope, which Holmes, cursing creatively, opened on the spot. _Attempting to contact the dead_ , Mycroft had written. _Mrs Watson sceptical_. 

"This," Holmes said, his heart thudding traitorously in its cavity, "requires a strengthening draught."

"You need more than that."

"Woman!" Holmes said, glaring; and Lidia relented sufficiently to lead him—on foot, after an up-and-down glance at his state of deshabille—around the periphery of a large plaça, down a main thoroughfare, around another traffic circle and along one of the wide, sweeping Ramblas stretching north from the port. 

"It's so dreadfully _early_ ," muttered Lidia. "It's still light, for God's sake." 

Which was almost true, Holmes supposed: a certain lavender hue still lingered over them, the oil-lamps struggling to make themselves noticed against the sky. Despite the hour, however, and Holmes's disreputable appearance, she succeeded in finding them an establishment that agreed to serve them not only sherry but also an assortment of ham and olives, and a rather dry potato omelette which Holmes inhaled in three bites before downing his glass in one. 

"You've been depriving yourself?" Lidia asked, wry. Holmes made a gesture that meant nothing in particular, and she took her cue: "All right, don't answer," apparently content to sit with her own thoughts as he continued devouring ham and sherry. 

_Attempting to contact the dead_ , Holmes thought, when he eventually paused for breath. Or—he supposed it was not _thinking_ , precisely; he was less actor and more acted upon. His head was pounding; the words would recur. _Mrs Watson sceptical. Attempting to contact_ —

"That man behind you," Lidia said: "an embezzler." 

Holmes jerked back into to himself. In the silver serviette-holder on the table, he examined the man's reflection. "Mmm," he said. "The inner pocket of his suit-jacket, and the duplicate record-keeping."

"And the fact his dinner companion is highly placed in the national bank," Lidia said.

"In an establishment such as this," Holmes said, gesturing with his glass. 

"At an _hour_ such as this," Lidia said. "Also, my contacts have known for months the bank was leaking funds. Now I have learned who."

She sat back, one arm over the back of her chair, the other digging a thumbnail into the fabric of her skirt; and Holmes had never known her with any extraordinary intimacy but when she got that particular look—though she didn't steeple her hands, or necessarily light her pipe—he would be self-blind indeed if he failed simply to recognise it. She was one of the best: that following-through of the implications of a piece of information to their logical conclusion. 

"Lidia," he said, squinting at her over his sherry. "You're—sensible."

"Salut." Lidia touched her glass to his glass. 

"If you became involved," he said. "With a man." 

"Hm, yes?"

"A gambler, perhaps." Warming to his theme. "A crack shot, and a drunkard. With a taste for peril plain as the nose on his face, which he yet refused to acknowledge to himself; still. A brave and a loyal man. And one with many other fine qualities and so on; we needn't belabour the point. After some years he, let's just suppose, marries another woman, another—this is an intelligent woman, you understand; a woman of whom _you_ felt: she could be trusted. You could entrust the blasted fool to her in reasonable confidence that his, his, eccentricities would be kept in check. And so you left Barcelona and—"

"Why," Lidia said, "would I do that." 

"Ah," said Holmes. "Yes. Hm." 

After some time, her boot nudged his ankle. 

"All right," he told her. "Say you marry the bastard yourself." 

"I would not marry such a man."

"Pardon?" 

"He sounds a passionate sort, but one I ought to keep from my chequebook." 

"For the sake of the _exercise_ ," Holmes said, scowling; and she huffed a laugh, nodding, gesturing with a blunt hand.

"All right," he went on. "The two of you marry. And perhaps he has some—difficulties, early on. The death of a parent, say, or—all right, the death of a friend, a. A close friend. Yes. Well I suppose—you understand, your husband might have been—in difficulties. A year. Perhaps two, he would require your." Holmes cleared his throat. "It's possible he would require a more than usual amount of care from you, during that time."

"Worse luck for the poor fellow," Lidia said. Her tone was wry as was her habit, her comment transparently at her own expense. But her eyes were bright; glistening; trained on his. 

"My point is merely," he said, looking away. "That those years… You've been married four, let's say four and a half years; and yes, all right, the first two may have been difficult; may have been." He cleared his throat again; and again. Christ. "But in any case, you—you help him through the worst of it, you—distract him, good God the man is distractible, I—I'd lay odds none of his previous lovers ever had trouble redirecting the bent of his thoughts in the days when they held that privilege, and things are, are better. You're _happy_ , you're—man and wife! Together! And yet still, now, he develops an absurd—mania, for." Holmes laughed, a little. "Communicating with the dead." 

He laughed again. A strange, uncontrolled sound. The sherry had gone unexpectedly to his head: cocooned now in darkness, the little room spun. 

"What," he said, closing his eyes, with his palms on the cool table. "What would you, a sensible woman, make of this behaviour? In your husband?"

"Have you ever _been_ married, Mr Holmes?" Lidia asked.

"Certainly not." His eyes, he found, had come open again: shocked wide by the suggestion.

"No," she mused. "No. Neither have I." 

Awaking the next morning on Lidia's divan Holmes found he had exhausted his own will to imagine that he was bound for Paris; or that the endpoint of his trajectory was undecided; or, when it came down to it, anything other than the unvarnished truth, which was that the moment Mycroft's first letter had found him he had cravenly abandoned everything—his fondly-held digs and his thrilling pursuits and his dearly-bought solitude—in favour of flying to London with all possible haste. This self-confession eased his explanations, and his journey to the station; but it also, from the moment he was seated in his compartment awaiting the departure of the train, made viscerally unbearable every momentary delay. The five minutes' postponed start due to a problem on the tracks; the winding tourist route along the southern French coastline; the endless blackness outside his window as he slept not at all on the overnight from Lyon; the transfer in Paris; the jog at Lille; and then, of course, the interminable wait for all assorted luggage and passengers to be herded on board the Calais ferry: insupportable, all of them; and yet support them he must. Lidia, at least, had shoved a packet of tobacco into his hand at parting. 

And then: the Dover cliffs; and the sensation—overwhelming, after all this time—of hearing, on every tongue, one's native language. Holmes half-expected his brother in person, or another functionary come to meet him and say—what? Perhaps simply: _Welcome back to England, Mr Holmes_ —but there was no one. Another two hours, watching the Kent of late summer unfold past his window, wondering if he ought to proceed directly to Cambridge where he had it on good authority the Palladino woman had set up shop, but—no. It was, at the last moment, a temptation too strong to resist: and so quietly he disembarked at Charing Cross; and was home. 

In the Strand. The station to his back. Awash with the bells of St. Martin in the Fields a horse-cab clicked past towards—"What've I _told_ you," a woman's voice from behind him in a broad Welsh accent, and her whining daughter: "But _Mama_ "—as before him a bookseller, straightening his window-display, who nodded companionably at Holmes and taking in that small, unthinking motion Holmes found he must—hold, for just a moment, to a lamp-post. His eyes smarting; _maudlin_ , he thought, _good Christ_ ; but it would come. Reeling, London-drunk, he laughed and kissed the lamp-post. A passing barrister cut a wide swathe around him and he laughed harder. London, he thought: _London_ ; and thus, laughing, he pushed off from the lamp-post and made his way through the milling crowd and the filthy street of his city.

In the event, he found, it was just as well that he had not continued on. A glance at the _Telegraph_ informed him, among other things, that the well-respected Italian medium Eusapia Palladino was down from Cambridge and just starting the second week of a fortnight's engagement in the Mayfair home of a Mr and Mrs Robert Allan, sittings every evening promptly at eight, advance notice required. As it was now, by Holmes's pocketwatch, just shy of five in the evening, there was plenty of time for an early supper of fish and chips eaten warm, newsprint smearing his hands as he strolled through Trafalgar Square; past St. James's, purchasing a shawl from a street vendor before cutting down Curzon Street to Hyde Park, where, meandering along the Serpentine, he snatched a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from the head of a professor dozing on a bench. _Absentminded don_ , he thought, feeling his own unshaven cheeks: _serviceable_ ; and from a likely fellow encountered near Kensington Palace, as the golden afternoon light slanted along the wide paths, bargained down the price for his worn-at-the-elbows summer jacket.

Holmes was sent distracted by the joy of it. There had been, of course, an exhilaration in discovery. In not knowing, when one turned a corner, what unexpected treasure might disclose itself. And there was a different pleasure in staying long enough in a place to begin to learn it: to piece together the unused storefronts and the unexpected alleyways, the strange recesses and the smells and the locations of its usefully unscrupulous inhabitants; so that one began to feel one progressed from perching on the skin of a place, to flowing in its veins. They were real pleasures, not to be denied; for years— _years_ he'd been telling himself that they were acceptable; that they were enough. That he was, if not satisfied, at least content, but all the time it had been—absurd. It had been absurd; it had been unworthy of him. It was a lie of the least convincing breed. Standing here, almost furious with relief at the corner of Palace Court and the Bayswater Road, he might close his eyes and feel, stretching out from his feet in all directions—'87, the St. Aubyn case, mingling in a top hat and tails in that house in St. Petersburgh Place while the hostess—branching outward to '85, absurd cloak-and-dagger abduction to the Russian Embassy, a room of which they'd attempted to pass of as—rolling onward to '81, that full-tilt dash through Paddington Station, shouting at the top of his voice while by his side Watson, pistol in his hand, Holmes's bruises still on his hips—

So. Then. The hour drew nigh, Holmes thought; and, as his feet had by this point carried him back to the eastern edge of the park, he stopped in briefly at a chemist for a few items to hoarsen his voice and change the shape of his face; then made his way in the gathering twilight toward the Allans' residence. 

This, it transpired, was a close, stuffy suite of rooms overlooking Grosvenor Square. Holmes, affecting a thick Scottish brogue and a brusque demeanour, offered the servant at the door the card of his new overcoat's erstwhile owner; and, gesturing at his throat, declined her offer to relieve him of his scarf. "I understand," she said, laying her hand on his arm; "many of our guests bring an object that was close to the departed"; and turned to lead him down a narrow corridor and into a dimly-lit parlour, where she announced "Professor Buchanan," as he nodded at the room at large. 

By design, he was early. Besides Mrs Allan, and the Palladino woman herself, only one person had preceded him: an elderly dowager in half-mourning. He seated himself at a shadowy corner of the table. In the face of his rasping voice and his curt replies, they soon left off their attempts to include him in the conversation, and by the time the other guests began to arrive he suspected they had all more or less forgotten his presence. 

The guests arrived in pairs, and singly: an eager young student with a specialty in the occult; a middle-aged man with brilliantined hair and an extravagantly drooping moustache, who announced his scepticism by seating himself at Holmes's right without greeting their hostess; a young mother with her adolescent daughter, both veiled in crape; and Dr John Watson. Looking—tired, Holmes thought. Half a stone heavier than last time they'd met, after four years of being fed by someone who knew how, but still: pale. Drawn. His hair had thinned, and rimed itself with silver, but his moustaches were exactly as Holmes, bloody—Christ. Without hesitation Watson approached Mrs Allan, and warmly she clasped his proffered hand: he had been here before, plainly, more times than one. Holmes sweated, bundled in his scarf in the airless room: rivulets down his spine, gathering itchily in the creases of his elbows. Watson's trousers and jacket were new-bought—as they would be; Mary would have sent him to the tailor—and then he put out his hand and his sleeve, just above his cuff, exposed—

 _"My last good shirt, Holmes," he had said, bare-chested and spluttering with exasperation, holding up the sleeve which was, to be frank, barely scorched; almost not blackened at all; and Holmes reclining nude in Watson's bed as the rain lashed at the windows of Baker Street: "Shame," had said, "but if you've nothing presentable to wear you may as well come back here and let me—"; and Watson had growled in that way that had always made Holmes's entire body want to—to_ undulate _, plead; to offer up every raw infirm stretch of his own skin stripped bare and panting to be—_

"Professor Buchanan?" at his elbow; Holmes started. 

"Hmph?" he said. "Pardon?" 

"Claret?" said the girl, but Holmes waved her off, feeling—the whole stuffy claustrophobic little room, narrowing in on him. He could scarcely get a breath or—quite the reverse: too much breath; so much it overbore him. Twenty feet away, Watson stood talking with Mrs Allan: subdued; polite; his pulse beating against the sleeve neat-cuffed about his wrist. The mark had been hardly noticeable, Holmes remembered thinking at the time. Unless one were already looking at the man's strong broad-boned wrist in shirtsleeves; at his tapered-calloused fingers; at the white-scarred skin stretched over his knuckles and if someone other than Holmes himself were doing that, he had thought, sharp and euphoric as Watson, pinning him to the mattress, had knotted his hands to the headboard with ruined white cotton, then they ought in all fairness to see the evidence of him, oughtn't they. Holmes's brand next to Watson's skin. 

Holmes swallowed. He ought to—stand up. To stroll out onto the balcony for a breath of air; gather the good Professor about himself: unknown to any persons in this room. But the assembled guests were assuming, now, an air of movement. Drifting toward the little table as if drawn by a mild gravitational field, they began, crowded together, to take their seats. Signora Palladino, of course, took the chair next to Holmes's: having been deprived the most shadowy corner at the table, she was bound to take second-best. To Holmes's right, still, the silent man, with the brilliantined hair. Across from him the student, and the widow and her daughter; Mrs Allan blushing and lovely at the head of her table and next to her, on Palladino's other side, Dr Watson. Ever the ladies' man, Holmes thought. Even married. Even straining the seams of the garment intended as a brand: _Property of Sherlock Holmes_ , good God, Holmes hadn't. He hadn't realised Watson even still owned the thing. Certainly he had never seen it during the period when Watson was courting Mary; nor in the long stretch of years before that but after their—arrangement had. Come to an end, and he couldn't. On the one hand: why _now_ , why _here_ ; and on the other, the squirming, scalding, crawling up his oesophagus and his trachea, undeniable fact that Watson had apparently kept the thing, for. Over a decade. Had to have been. _Many of our guests bring an object that was close to the departed_ , the maid had told him, in the corridor; Holmes pulled his stifling scarf closer about his throat. 

The assembled guests crowded shoulder-to-shoulder around the little table. The candles were lit; the crowd hushed. Signora Paladino instructed them in a low voice to join hands. Her own was hot in Holmes's; that of the brilliantined man slightly clammy. Silence descended save for a low chant which the Signora seemed to be repeating under her breath. Choosing her target, most probably. His own pulse was galloping, he knew. Surely more so than Watson's on her other side who had seen her dog-and-pony show before, who had. Had come, too, to her lodgings in Cambridge, looking for—wearing—shaking the hands of her hosts with his wrists on display and Holmes had to. Breathe, he mustn't. Mustn't give himself away to a confidence artist who might very well draw attention to him by choosing as her first mark the agitated stranger, at pains to pretend—

Her whole body _jolted_. With a rattling wheeze she tipped back her head. Gasps from the student and the widow's daughter; to his right, Holmes was conscious of the brilliantined man leaning forward while Palladino's arm jerked, spasmodically, at Holmes's hand. Her whole chest and back drew tight into an arch dramatic enough that Holmes could see past her to Watson, on her other side. That rapt look, bloody— _Watson_ , Holmes thought. He wanted to—weep; to shake the man: looking between them. Well. Signora Palladino had Watson's attention, complete, in just the way she wanted it: but that of Holmes had always been a trickier beast. And thus he observed: unusual callous at the outside of Palladino's thumb—small compartment in the brooch pinned to her high collar—flight of the widow's hand to her locket—downturn of Watson's mouth (sympathetic pain) which had used to be—gaze of Mrs Allan lighting on Holmes's brilliantined neighbour—and the transfer, cleverly done under cover of shadow and of her own seizing jerking movements, of Professor Buchanan's hand into that of the fellow on her other side, leaving her own hands, under the table, free, and Holmes's thumb—

"Carlotta," the medium intoned, in a voice forced, gravelly; all eyes snapped to her face as her own eyes rolled in her head; "Alessandro," the widow gasped, and "Papa?" breathed the girl next to her as Holmes forced himself to turn his face toward the spectacle.

—Holmes's thumb on Watson's wrist, under his chemical-burnt sleeve. 

Palladino wailed and the entire table lurched. Rose up, fitfully, on the side near the widow; and then dropped back to the carpet. Across from Holmes the mother and daughter were sobbing openly, their tears falling unchecked; the table nearing their chests. Hysterically, Holmes thought: a mechanism. Wire? Pneumatics? It must be operable with no advance notice of seating arrangements, since they had none of them been directed to particular chairs; thus it must be hidden about the Signora's bodice or under her skirts and and Watson's hand, shifting against Holmes's so that under Holmes's index finger ran the scar from where he'd gouged himself on a tie-off piling that day on the wharf during the McElhaney case before Holmes had tackled them to the ground and Watson had trained his gun on them while Holmes panted and watched and then Holmes had, had taken him home and bandaged him next to the sink and teased Watson about his reckless disregard for the principles of maritime safety until Watson, leaning forward—would feel Holmes's heart, he realised. Signora Palladino was slumped forward, breathing heavily, their hands in her lap; and if Holmes did not work to redirect his own thoughts then John Watson, doctor, would come to the inevitable conclusion that his venerable neighbour was on the brink of collapse from either an overindulgence in chemical stimulants or a dangerous heart condition: both of which, Holmes thought, stifling the urge to uncontrolled laughter, were, unfortunately, the bare truth; and in fact made up a combination all too familiar to the John Watson who in Baker Street had used to—

"Wat—son," Signora Palladino ground out; and "Holmes," Watson gasped, his face—wide open; clutching at Holmes's hand like to break his bones and this was. Though evidence had pointed to this it had beggared belief. Holmes felt as if the top of his head would burn off; float away. 

"Holmes," said Watson, again. That clicking in his throat as he attempted to master himself: it was too much. Surely, Holmes thought, regardless of the man's mission in coming here, he would test his source. Ensure the reliability of his facts: he had lived, after all, with Holmes for nigh on fifteen years. He would press; he would challenge. He would request of her some detail suitable for public consumption yet not published in _The Strand_ , say: _Who were the clients who paid us in Spanish wine_ , or: _That public house on the water, that spring we found ourselves in Brittany—what did you deduce about the woman by the door?_ Surely Holmes's Watson had enough sense to see the—the _potential_ , in any case, for absurdity, sitting here in a darkened parlour next to an Italian stage-magician with a wire hooked to her ankle, who had no doubt roughened her voice with the same chemist's concoction that Holmes had used himself not an hour since and which Watson, on any _number_ of occasions, had watched him mix, standing in their kitchen in his shirtsleeves and his braces with his hip angled against the oven, cigarette caught between his perfect lips and that amused, exasperated look on his face, _Can I get you an eye of newt, Holmes?_ , falsely solicitous and transparently, during a certain period, saying anything at all only so that Holmes would look up at him, would, smiling, give back what he was given; and if the mixture were not at an especially crucial point would perhaps straighten up; cross their little kitchen and, belligerent, explain the error of Watson's thinking, looking up into Watson's blue eyes, his prodding finger to Watson's chest as Watson laughed. So that now, surely Watson would say— _What do you use? Sulfur? Or a more personalised allergen?_ , but—:

"Holmes, are you—at peace," Watson choked out. Holmes's sinking gut. "Are you content?" Watson went on, and Holmes could do nothing to stop him although those were—Watson _knew_ those were probably the two things which Holmes had never, not once in his experience, ever been. His hand in Watson's gripping hand. Was _this_ the test, then? he thought; but when Signora Palladino croaked, "Happy," Watson only made a sort of bitten-off sob, pressing his lips together; and Holmes, suddenly, could not withstand another minute of this. 

"Peaceful," Signora Palladino went on; and Watson said, horribly: "Are you really, Holmes, are you—"; as Holmes, as if by accident, moved his knee in such a way to twitch aside the table-cloth and also jostle, ever so slightly, the leg of his brilliantined neighbour. When he saw the man's gaze flick down Holmes closed his eyes, Watson's warm hand, for one last moment, in his. 

There followed quite a scene. 

In another mood—indeed, in most moods—Holmes would have derived from the fracas both personal gratification and a more generalised vigour: the abrupt move by Holmes's neighbour to overturn the table, so that it knocked both the student and the widow's daughter back onto the carpet and revealed, on the other side, the mechanism in Signora Palladino's freed hands; the haughty outrage of the widow, who drew herself up to deliver curses in their native language upon the disgraced medium; and, by contrast, the somewhat less constrained rage of the dowager, who threw dignity to the four winds and whacked Signora Palladino about the head and shoulders with her walking-stick; the flustered mortification of Mrs Allan, who joined the recriminations with a stuttered demand that the woman leave her house immediately. Under most circumstances, the entire three-ring circus would have formed quite an evening's satisfying amusement. 

But: Watson's hand, wrenched out of his. Watson jumped back, out of his seat, pressing his shaking fingers to his mouth. His face drained so quickly of colour that Holmes thought the man might collapse; and indeed he swayed, a moment, where he stood, staring down at Signora Palladino with his features twisting up into—not rage, Holmes thought. That would have been preferable; recognisable: Watson in a temper. But in this, tonight, there was so very little anger. It was _grief_. Raw and wringing and horrible to see, exposed as Watson would never wish to be to this room of, for all he knew, strangers. And then Watson turned, almost aimless, and wandered out of the rooms, stooped and bare-headed, as if walking in his sleep. 

And so Holmes—

Well. It wasn't as if there were any object in remaining here. And the man was likely to want his hat, eventually. 

Watson had never been difficult to follow. Even less now, fairly staggering as he was, his weaving gate and his stumbling. Four years on he had wished to think Holmes _content_ ; to think him _at peace_ : had wished it with sufficient desperation to set aside everything he had ever known of Holmes himself and believe it from a stranger's lips—and on seeing the fraud exposed, was rendered transparently desolate on a public street. And yet, mere months after Holmes's own death, when Holmes had—had paid his visit, unseen, to the Watsons' sitting-room, the man had seemed. Subdued, perhaps. Grieving, yes; writing still about his loss. But upright. Able to be comforted, and urged onward by his strong and capable helpmeet. It was how Holmes had known he must leave London: seeing them together like that, cocooned and steady in their mutual regard and setting out every day to walk down Crawford Street and through Regent's Park, where with time any palimpsests of Holmes would fade, and come to be covered over. They had been—as one; complete. Steady against one another. Whereas now, though Watson's feet directed him back toward those same rooms, he moved through the night like a man unmoored. More than once he collided with passers-by; to their castigations for public drunkenness he offered no defence. When his shoe sank into a new-left horse dropping, he reacted not at all. 

At length, Watson shuffled through the front door of his lodgings. Holmes, hat in hand, stood outside; and he pictured for a moment a different man, standing in his place. A man who might ring the landlady; exchange polite words about the summer heat; leave the abandoned article downstairs to be returned to its owner on the morrow; and who would then take his leave, and return whence he had come, not knowing, with any certainty, just what he had witnessed. Watson had often claimed to wish Holmes were such a man. Very occasionally, Holmes had wished it himself.

He set the hat on the pavement, next to the front door. At the corner of the building was fastened an old fire ladder: rusted and rickety with a decade of rain, but still, Holmes hoped, serviceable. A laburnum tree flourished outside the Watsons' window; at this hour, unless someone passed directly beneath him, he was unlikely to be seen. Two floors up, his side pressed to brick and Professor Buchanan's scarf pulled up about his face, he craned his neck to take in the scene behind the glass. 

And there: Watson, lurching through the door. And there: Mary, in her dressing-gown: setting her mending to one side, rising to meet him. Her pale face, in the second before her back was turned to Holmes, betrayed dismay; sympathy—yet not, precisely, surprise. She went to him, arms outstretched, and he simply _sagged_ into her. His eyes closing. His back bowed; his forehead sinking to her shoulder. 

Mary turned her head. Nudged at the side of Watson's face; spoke into Watson's ear. _John's_ , to her. She murmured, holding him; and he shook his head once, hard, his hands clenching against her back. 

Only rarely had Holmes seen Watson so distraught; but on those occasions… it had been true, what he'd told Lidia. Though it hadn't been—tawdry, as one might make out. Sordid. It was only that Watson, in extremis, rendered dumb by the weight of strong emotion, unfurled to human touch like a plant, sun-starved. It hadn't taken long after the commencement of their—interlude, before Holmes had learned as much: how, locked into himself, his machinery jammed by fear or grief that resisted all assays of logic or reason, the man would simply _open_ to a mouth at his nape. Hands on the skin of his back, or his belly. Turning, hot in Holmes's arms, to bite and nuzzle, beast-like, pressing close, it had been. Communion. Once learned, Holmes wondered how it was ever possible to rub along with the man without knowing. Which, evidently, Mary did as well: as now she kissed Watson's neck; his ear. From the angle of her arms and the movement of her shoulder she was caressing now the small of his back: that place that, when Holmes had splayed a hand, or trailed biting kisses down Watson's bare spine—even now, at her touch through his shirt and his summer jacket, Watson shuddered. Tipped his head back, fists in the fabric of her dressing-gown, and spoke to the ceiling in such a way that she drew him yet closer. Protective, Holmes thought. The wish to shield him from harm. She reached up; guided his face back toward hers, and ran a thumb across his cheekbone, and under his eye: drying the skin there before she leaned up to kiss his lovely mouth. 

He would let himself be led, Holmes thought. And indeed: gently Mary pressed him back a step, and back, toward the chaise against the wall; and where she pressed him, he allowed himself to go. Still clutching her gown with a desperation half-feral, half-childlike, he stepped; and he stepped, and when he reached the chaise he half-unbalanced sat and she straddled him, pink silk pooling around her calves. Her knees tucked next to his thighs as she bent to kiss him, so tender Holmes could scarcely—. And Watson, his hands unsteady, reaching up: sliding her dressing-gown off her shoulders to slip down; slither to the floor. The narrow white curve of her back. She looked thin—although. Although women, Holmes thought desperately. Women, done up for polite society, were swathed in enough fabric to disguise well their true proportions. Watson's fingers traced her hips. His soft lips on hers. One hand on her narrow shoulder; the fingers of the other tracing her visible ribs. He cupped gently her slight buttocks and lifted her closer and Holmes thought of—Irene, her back to him in that Weymouth inn, shedding the £50 nightdress bought for as a matter of course by her American tycoon, cocking one eyebrow at him over her shoulder, a laughing caress to her full round peach of a little arse—and Irene, Holmes thought, blinking hard, had always been a smaller woman than Watson's Mary. 

Who was moving her hips, now, down against her husband's. Lowering her face to kiss him, wiping still at his cheeks, and he with his restless hands on her back; on her waist; on her thighs around his thighs. Holmes wondered if with his wife Watson were as a matter of course more restrained, or if such moderation had come with age; because when Watson's hands had moved like that on Holmes he'd always accompanied it with the most filthy pleading but now, as far as Holmes could tell from the visible corner of Watson's jaw, he seemed not to speak at all. Only to hold tight; to hitch himself against her in little broken movements. To press himself against his Mary: who drew back, now. Shifted her weight to one knee in order to twist her body; make space to reach down between them and unfasten his trousers; and with her in half-profile and somewhat to the side Holmes could see, full-on, Watson's face—

_—Switzerland, yes; but even—after the Inverrary case. Watson's three-day bacchanal; Holmes's miscalculation in his absence. They wouldn't have killed him, not in all probability. It wasn't like—what happened later. They'd only stripped him and starved him, and roughed him up a bit when they had found it convenient. And as Watson, painting the town with a friend just home from the Boer rebellion, had taken several days to realise that Holmes had been abducted and another few to track him down, the effects had apparently been sufficiently noticeable that after he had fed him and bathed him Watson, his once-golden skin grey-green with exhaustion, had knelt before him where Holmes perched on the side of the bed and run his shaking hands over Holmes's knees and his hips; had pressed his mouth and his leaking eyes to his thighs; had got Holmes hard and gasping and feeling somehow _criminal_ about it because all the while Watson had clung to him and looked up at him as if, just behind Holmes's left shoulder, he stared down a _nothingness_ so complete—_

And now. To stare it down again. Hand on her side with her hand on his cock, face twisted with grief as he panted and moved with her, Watson looked up at his Mary, whom Holmes now knew—incontrovertibly, beyond the power of denial or imagination—was dying. 

Even Holmes could not watch. Quiet as he could, which was very nearly silent, he descended the ladder; moved it back to its cradle at the corner of the building. Walked back out, into the London night.

 _Are you at peace_ , Watson had asked. _Are you content?_ ; and Holmes, inevitability that he was, had twitched aside the table-linen to reveal the gaping emptiness behind the sham behind the cloth of it. Merciless: he had half-known it was merciless. More than half. Any idiot could see who in Watson's life had any prospect—any _desire_ , come to that—for peace, or contentment. Sherlock Holmes, he thought—wending his way amongst the nighttime denizens of Picadilly: a barkeep having a fag against the door of his pub; young girl touching the wrist of a leering banker—had many strong suits; but those were never they. He had known. He had known but he had wanted—Christ. Something which now seemed so paltry: to replace that of the Palladino woman with his own magic-trick. To think, as he had attempted to do since Athens, since Constantinople, that it might solve some riddle; remove the difficulty with the application of some little cleverness. And then, sitting in that overheated little parlour: that it might take the pallor from Watson's skin; the haunted hollow dullness from his regard. A certain resurrection, miraculously, was within Holmes's scope. Only: not that resurrection. 

It was done, however. And now he had committed himself to his course. To return to London only to leave the oil-lit night of (looking about him) Coventry Street; or the morning press of Leicester Square, knotted with trams and hansom cabs; or the old card-room behind McGraw's butcher shop, stumbling-distance from Baker Street; or all the dozens of gin-palaces and wine-bars; or the dark-flowing filthy Thames; or the whole avenue of flowering laburnum trees outside his flat to be wandered alone by a Watson freshly awash in grief would be—more than Holmes was capable of. One could not ask such impossible things; he was only. Himself. 

Whatever could be made of him. Even a burnt sleeve, dug up from the bottom of a box of old things to be cut up for rags. A wild impulse: a glimpse of a newspaper notice. A day long past, dimly remembered. It was not nothing. Mycroft, he thought, weaving his way through the night mud of Maiden Lane. Mycroft had very capably summoned him, and so to Mycroft he would go; and continue on the twisting path back to life.

**Author's Note:**

> Eusapia Palladino, an historical medium, was indeed in England in the summer of 1895. She was staying primarily in Cambridge in the home of Frederic William Henry Myers, an investigator of paranormal phenomena who came to the highly-publicized conclusion that she was a fake and her effects were accomplished via trickery. Surreptitiously joining the hands of the two participants to her left and right, thereby freeing her own to create effects, was one of the documented ways Palladino pulled her cons. As far as I know she didn't actually visit London during this time, but hey, nor do I know that she didn't. The brilliantined skeptic to Holmes's right in this story is a nod to John Nevil Maskelyne, a stage magician who was historically instrumental in discrediting her. You can [appreciate for yourself his hairstyling choices](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/John_Nevil_Maskelyne.jpg/220px-John_Nevil_Maskelyne.jpg). 
> 
> Title is almost required to be from Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H," though late in the process I became disappointed that Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion" would be anachronistic. Anyway I went with Canto 6:
> 
> One writes, that Other friends remain,'  
> That 'Loss is common to the race'—  
> And common is the commonplace,  
> And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
> 
> That loss is common would not make  
> My own less bitter, rather more:  
> Too common! Never morning wore  
> To evening, but some heart did break.
> 
> O father, wheresoe'er thou be,  
> Who pledgest now thy gallant son;  
> A shot, ere half thy draught be done,  
> Hath still'd the life that beat from thee.
> 
> O mother, praying God will save  
> Thy sailor,—while thy head is bow'd,  
> His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud  
> Drops in his vast and wandering grave.
> 
> Ye know no more than I who wrought  
> At that last hour to please him well;  
> Who mused on all I had to tell,  
> And something written, something thought;
> 
> Expecting still his advent home;  
> And ever met him on his way  
> With wishes, thinking, 'here to-day,'  
> Or 'here to-morrow will he come.'
> 
> O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,  
> That sittest ranging golden hair;  
> And glad to find thyself so fair,  
> Poor child, that waitest for thy love!
> 
> For now her father's chimney glows  
> In expectation of a guest;  
> And thinking 'this will please him best,'  
> She takes a riband or a rose;
> 
> For he will see them on to-night;  
> And with the thought her colour burns;  
> And, having left the glass, she turns  
> Once more to set a ringlet right;
> 
> And, even when she turn'd, the curse  
> Had fallen, and her future Lord  
> Was drown'd in passing thro' the ford,  
> Or kill'd in falling from his horse.
> 
> O what to her shall be the end?  
> And what to me remains of good?  
> To her, perpetual maidenhood,  
> And unto me no second friend.


End file.
